Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Guest Post: "Ultimate Stalinist Project" by Allen W. McDonnell

In 1949, when
the first rumors of very deep diving NATO submarines patrolling the Sea
of Marmara were reported by the KGB the General Secretary himself,
Joseph Stalin, ordered a new secret project. Soviet submarines were
vulnerable when they tried to sneak through the Sea of Marmara, which
lies between the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits that lead out of the
Black Sea and into the Mediterranean Sea. During the Great Patriotic War,
which the West insisted on calling World War II, the Nazi U-Boot fleet
had mastered entry and exit into the Mediterranean Sea through the
Strait of Gibraltar. This had been done because the deep current flowed
out of the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic while the surface
current had flowed the opposite direction. By carefully controlling
their depth, a U-Boot could silently glide without using engine power
from one body of water to the other.

In
the case of the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, the dense bottom
Mediterranean Sea waters operated the same way they did through
Gibraltar; however, the deep channel leading from the Bosporus between the
Sea of Marmara and Black Sea did not extend all the way. Instead it
extended about half way from the coastline of Turkey into the Black Sea
across the continental shelf, then it took a 90 degree turn to the
north-northeast and grew shallower until ending abruptly a great
distance from the deep waters of the Black Sea. This meant a Soviet
submarine hugging the bottom to stay silent and rift with the current
was at considerable risk of collision with the sharp bend in the course
of the canyon. Even if they successfully managed to negotiate the turn ,
they would have to use some power maneuver to do so safely giving away
their location to any listening NATO sonar personnel. Even worse,
because the canyon swallowed at the turn and kept doing so, they would be
forced up into the mixed water layer well short of the deep Black Sea
basin and again be forced to use engine power to maneuver.

Therefore Stalin concluded the only solution was to extend the channel
from the point of the turn to continue in the same direction all the way
to the edge of the continental shelf, deep enough for his submarines to
maintain a bottom hugging depth in the strong current flow all the way
to the deep Black Sea basin. There existed a 70 meter depth sill, a
high spot, in the Dardanelles passage and even worse near the beginning
of the Bosporus there was an even shallower 40 meter sill. However ,
neither was blocking the USSR submarines, when skillfully operated, from
sneaking through the passages themselves hugging the bottom. This was a
risky maneuver particularly in the Bosporus because it had several
sharp curves as it passed from the Sea of Marmara to the underwater
canyon in the Black Sea continental shelf. Even so the best submarine
handlers had managed to prove it was possible right up to the sharp turn
in the canyon already mentioned. Therefore the initial goal of the
mega project was to create a passage from the sharp bend in the canyon
to the nearest edge of the continental shelf and the deep Black Sea
basin.

To carry out the project without being too obvious to NATO observers, a
half a dozen Soviet fishing trawlers were fitted with modified drag
nets. The new 'nets' were designed so that the ship could deploy them,
dragging over the sea floor with thousands of tiny scoops that would
loosed and drag soil and rocks, even moderate size boulders. Each night
the trawlers would head out, and, once the ship had completed its passage
across the continental shelf, large debris like boulders and rocks as
small as a baked potato would simply tumble over the edge into the
deeper basin. After they had passed several miles into the deep basin ,
the trawler would slow to steerage speed. This would cause the 'net' to
change angle from nearly horizontal to nearly vertical and the water
flow over the small 'scoops' would wash them free of the muck and small
particles they had dragged along in their shallow paddle shapes. The
trawler would then pull in its 'net' and go to a nearby soviet port
where it would pretend to unload its catch of fish. The next evening, it
would go back to sea deploying its 'net' at the bend in the underwater
canyon and repeat the process. With six ships conducting the work and
the vagaries of the navigational skills of day to day life at sea, the
drag path was not exactly a precise location. In fact, the trawlers
paths were mostly overlapping but in a swath the better part of a
kilometer wide. As a result each passage by all six ships in a night
took a month to start carving a new channel just a meter deep.

If nothing else, however, the USSR was persistent. Once the plan was
devised and the orders were given the process would continue until the
orders changed, or the funding ran out completely. Over time the
dredging 'nets' were improved. It was fortunate for the project that
the bedrock in this portion of the continental shelf was friable shale
and not granite or basalt. This meant the 'nets' were able to gouge and
scrape the shale away small layer by small layer. Eventually, nearly
five years after the plan was enacted Comrade General Secretary Stalin
died. Whispered rumor was he had been poisoned, but his successors were
not about to permit a full autopsy with published results to take place.
The scraping and dredging had gone on month after month gradually
creating a wide shallow passage 47 meters deep by the time the successor
cancelled the project. Turkey and Greece had joined NATO two years
earlier, and the Turks were grumbling about Soviet fishermen working so
close to the Bosporus passage. Rather than have their secret discovered,
the new General Secretary declared the Red Navy would have to live with
the dredged channel the way it was instead of the way they wished it
could be. Starting in December 1954 when the dredging was cancelled, the
Soviet submarines started practicing using the artificial channel.
Previously use had been forbidden as there was concern a sub might
become disabled and interrupt the ability of the trawlers to proceed
dredging. The new nuclear submarine in design at the time would be 12
meters from the top of the sail to the bottom of the hull, but the
periscopes and snorkels would add two or three meters of additional
height on top of that. Hugging the bottom of the channel it was hoped
the water flowing to the deep basin of the Black Sea would be strong
enough to pull them along silent as a hole in the ocean, as the American
navy liked to boast about their own silent running techniques. The
concern was the passage was so wide that the water flow might be too
weak, but a new diesel submarine (NATO designated WHISKEY class)
successfully pulled off the 'silent passage' within a week of the
dredging being halted.

Whatever else people might say about General Secretary Stalin, he never
thought small and when he decided to have something done he put
resources into doing it. Often for projects that meant much slave labor
working itself to death but in the case of the "Stalin Channel" as the
Red Navy called this project few gulag slaves had been involved because
the work had been simple dredging, once the 'nets' were built. Certainly
they had been involved in building the first six 'nets' and in the
replacements as those wore out quickly, but compared to a project like
the White Canal the effort was trivial in terms of labor.

As the Stalin Channel had been gradually carved out after the first few
months a little of the water from the Bosporus canyon started using the
new channel instead of continuing down the canyon around the bend and
gradually being forced up as it shallowed. By the time dredging was
called to a halt, nearly all of the flow down the natural canyon had
begun traveling down the new Stalin Channel because despite its shallow
depth it was very broad and offered less resistance to the dense bottom
water than the up slope after the bend in the natural pathway. When the
Mediterranean Sea bottom water had followed the chain of natural
connections all the way from the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, Sea
of Marmara and land bound portion of the Bosporus Strait that heavy
warm bottom water had stayed almost unchanged from its condition when
leaving the Mediterranean Sea. Where it had struck the bend in the
natural canyon of the Bosporus it had considerable inertia and a score
of miles of entrained flow following it. this had given it the energy to
climb the gradual slope up the last portion of the natural canyon until
it was on the continental shelf itself, which has a gradual slope down
to the edge of the continental plate where the drop off into the deeps
takes place. As a consequence this warm dense very salty water had been
forced up into turbulent contact with the brackish surface waters of the
Black Sea which were only about half as salty as the bottom waters
were. the resulting blended water had then fanned out over the
continental shelf flowing down slope into the deep basin where over the
eons since the passage opened it had displaced the fresh lake water
which had originally filled the basin with the mixed water. The
Mediterranean Sea bottom water at the sharp turn in the canyon still had
a salinity of 35 parts per thousand (ppt) while the brackish surface
waters ranged from 12 to 17 ppt. The mixture created by the turbulent
flow of the deep waters swirling into the brackish waters had averaged
out to 22 ppt and that concentration of water had filled the deep basin
of the Black Sea over the millennia after the passage opened. In the
modern era, that deep basin water was turbulently mixed with river water
from the Don, Danube and others which flowed into the Black Sea and
which had originally formed the fresh water lake in that basin. the
resulting mixture of that river water and the 22 ppt bottom water where
the rivers poured in the fresh water averaged out to 12 ppt to 17 ppt
brackish surface water. It was literally halfway between the fresh
water from the rivers and the deep salt water from the Mediterranean Sea
in its total salt content. This was a very unusual situation because
normally when a river enters a large body of salt water the lighter
fresh water spreads out in a thinner and thinner layer. Once a crucial
thickness threshold is passed the thin fresh water layer gets mixed with
the salt water beneath through wind driven wave action, and the
quantity of salt water is so vast compared to the rivers flowing in the
salt content quickly averages out. Because the Black Sea basin had
started out completely fresh water and the flow rate of the rivers
entering it was so enormous in the modern era, even thousands of years
after the passages opened it still had a much lower salinity on average
than the world ocean, and this created a vast surface pool of brackish
water.

Now for the first time thanks to the Stalin Channel dredged across the
continental shelf the dense very salty Mediterranean Sea bottom water
had a passage way to the deep Black Sea basin. The total quantity of
bottom water flowing into the Black Sea had not changed, the Dardanelles
and Bosporus sills were still in place at 70 and 40 meters respectively
which restricted how much water could pass eastward on the bottom.
However, now instead of being premixed with the brackish surface waters
and having its salinity lowered to 22 ppt before it reached the deep
basin the 35 ppt water had a free passage to cross the continental shelf
and drop off into the abyss. The heavy high salinity water was
reaching the edge of the continental shelf and dropping straight down
the steep slope without having mixed with the brackish water first.
Because if its density it went all the way to the bottom which forced
the 22 ppt water which had occupied those depths up. On the surface
where the 22 ppt waters mixed with the fresh river waters nothing
obvious was changed. However 22 ppt water was no longer forming from
all of the in flowing 35 ppt bottom water, about 90% of the in flowing
water was falling into the abyss unchanged just as it had been during
the passage all the way from the Mediterranean Sea and only 10% was
mixing to form 22 ppt water on the continental shelf depth.

It might take eons from a human perspective, but the 35 ppt
Mediterranean Sea water would eventually displace all that 22 ppt water
sitting in the bottom of the Black Sea in the modern era. When that
process was complete the basin waters would gradually rise up the slope
of the Continental Shelf until they met the 10% of the bottom water
flowing in and still mixing with the brackish surface waters to form the
22 pt water. When that event took place in that far distant (from a
human perspective) point in time the in flowing river waters would no
longer be mixing with 22 ppt partially diluted water, instead they would
be mixing directly with 35 ppt Mediterranean Sea water itself. The
brackish nature of the surface waters of the Black Sea would be shifted
from 17 ppt much closer to 30 ppt, nearly the same as the 34 ppt world
average. This would make it easy for many species of aquatic plants and
fish which did not do well in the modern Black Sea to thrive in
response to the altered environmental conditions. Ultimately it would
also change the distribution of flow in and out of the basin through its
multiple steps into the Mediterranean Sea. In the modern era about
1/3rd of the water exchange was bottom water flowing in and 2/3rds was
brackish water flowing out. Once the water had moderated to approach
world sea averages the depth of the brackish layer would first decline
and then cease, becoming just a case of excess surface water exiting to
join the Mediterranean Sea. By that time the in flow of bottom water
would balance the outflow of surface water rather than exceeding it.

In the modern era, however, for the USSR the channel was a large boon as
it made it possible to sneak a number of submarines from other operating
areas into the Black Sea without detection and for them that was all
that mattered. For their distant descendants enjoying the altered Black
Sea it was unlikely they would realize how or why those changed
conditions had come about, even if they were curious enough to ask.

Provine's note: Western intelligence made note of the change in fishermen's attitudes with Greek and Turkish fishermen in the Mediterranean excited by boosted catches while the Black Sea fishermen began to suffer worse and worse hauls, although theories about a Soviet channel were dismissed for decades.